02/15/2017

Baby Boomer Women - The Pros and Cons of Those Single-Sex Colleges

Girls & Sex" by Peggy Orenstein provides facts and (masked) interviews about how Generation Z females are navigating the changed world of sex.

Overall, it's one in which women are, well, "putting out" a lot but not getting much satisfaction in return. It's the age-old story: Many of their male partners are self-absorbed.

Rape, in all its myriad versions, is becoming more commonplace. Of course, the young women are traumatized.

But society tends to blame them. After all, they are wearing crop tops, mini skirts and bare legs in six-inch heels. For social reasons, that kind of attire staging makes them feel hot, which is how they want to appear. However, simultaneously they are transmitting what is interpreted as a come-hither sexual signal.

In a sense, the technology of The Pill put all this in play. Before The Pill the threat of pregnancy was very real. It was common sense for society to impose the ethos of "waiting until marriage, or at least a serious relationship."

Those of us from earlier generations who have little interaction with Generation Z might be surprised by Orenstein's findings. After all, those women seem to have what we never envisioned in terms of choices. They can give in all to building careers. Don't have to find a husband or even a life partner (if lesbian). Can bypass child-bearing completely.

However, the world of sexual freedom they live their lives in is, as Orenstein puts it, "complicated." Could some of the complications be delayed until they can "manage" them emotionally and socially? One tool for making that happen is to return to all-female educational institutions. Especially colleges.

In 2016, influential Vanity Fair published an article about the rising demand for single-sex colleges. Currently there are about 42 of them left.

Many, such as my alma mater, Seton Hill, Greensburg, Pennsylvania, went co-ed. They probably had to, to survive.

Not that they were perfect institutions for helping shape our young female senses of self, confidence and ability to think critically. On my enemies list, which has only hardened in time, are classmates such as Kathleen Huebner. Had I been at a co-ed college, she et al. probably couldn't have reached into my soul. As in a Shakespearean drama about feuds, the sound of Huebner's very name enrages me.

What single-sex institutions of learning, including high schools, do provide is a buffer between the daily demands of growing up and those "outsiders" would saddle us with before we were ready. It could be days of heaven to become of age where we females could have the opportunity to be able to decide: Hey, I can't handle this, not right now.